D.L. Mayfield
Appearances
Flightless Bird
Focus on The Family
Well, honestly, I think the most interesting thing about Focus on the Family is how ubiquitous it is. It was like one of the things that's so hard is when you talk about evangelicals in America, right, there's so many qualifiers you need to have.
Flightless Bird
Focus on The Family
And right now we're in a time in America, right, where I guess Christian nationalist is now the phrase we're using, right, for people who are marrying their religious identity with their political identity. And they seem to have won, you know, politically right now.
Flightless Bird
Focus on The Family
And all of that ideology is directly tied to focus on the family's aims and their aims in the beginning, because it was founded by James Dobson. He wrote multiple books about this. So we know exactly what his aims were. His aim was, was to teach parents how to discipline their kids in a way where they would learn to immediately comply to authority. And he was coming from this deep...
Flightless Bird
Focus on The Family
patriarchal panic right uh growing up who he was in the 1950s the 1960s like shook him to his core in particular he wrote a lot about watching white christian kids protest vietnam right in the streets to start protesting the great nation of america right he was like what has happened Oh, it's people like Fred Rogers happened. Permissive parenting happened, right?
Flightless Bird
Focus on The Family
People stopped beating their children to get them to obey in early childhood and beyond. Now everybody's rebelling. He also equated feminism, the civil rights movement, all this stuff. He was like, this is ruining our Christian country. The way to get it back is we must start to control our children. And so he had this whole thing of, parenting in a godly way is about controlling with love.
Flightless Bird
Focus on The Family
And that was his whole thing. And that was the basis of Focus on the Family. So if you look at a bunch of disparate churches around America, they're going to disagree on a lot of things.
Flightless Bird
Focus on The Family
They probably all parent their kids in the same way, and they probably pressure the people in their congregations to parent their kids in this specific way, which marries corporal punishment early and often with the explicit aim of what Dobson called breaking the will of a child.
Flightless Bird
Focus on The Family
He had a talk he called Dare to Discipline. He had a talk he called The Strong-Willed Child. He videotaped those messages and they were sent out to schools. They were sent out to prisons. They were sent out everywhere. And according to his own organization, so take this with a grain of salt,
Flightless Bird
Focus on The Family
He says in the 1980s, one third of America watched these videos or at least had access to watching these videos on discipline and how don't listen to Mr. Rogers, right? Don't listen to any of these people that are actually doing the studies about how harmful it is to parent your kids in these way. Do it. And it really worked.
Flightless Bird
Focus on The Family
His books sold so well, they kind of helped start Christian publishing, if I'm being perfectly honest. And Christian publishing became this way to spread information to a network of churches that, again, while they might not agree on everything theologically, they'll all buy the same books and they'll all parent their kids the same way because this is the only God-ordained way to parent a kid.
Flightless Bird
Focus on The Family
Okay, so how Dr. Dobson got his start, he actually was the protege of a really famous guy named Paul Popenoe. Paul Popenoe was this known eugenicist who inspired the Third Reich. He, in turn, was very inspired by the Third Reich. In particular... their policies on how to sterilize large groups of people. He was so into this because he was a white supremacist, right?
Flightless Bird
Focus on The Family
He eventually figures out, oh, you can't be that way anymore publicly in America. So he then starts... He he's the first marriage and family counselor in American history. And his expressed aim was to help white women marry white men, stay married to them and have a ton of kids. Right. And then raise those kids in such a way they would replicate these white supremacist patriarchal values.
Flightless Bird
Focus on The Family
he actually authored those columns, Can This Marriage Be Saved? Like, that was his whole shtick for the latter part of his life. And it was all what he called a positive eugenics movement. How do we help white people have tons of kids?
Flightless Bird
Focus on The Family
And then Dr. Dobson was his protege and was like, and then once they had the kids, they got to discipline the kids in such a way to replicate these white supremacist patriarchal values. So, In Dr. Dobson's first book, which was called Dare to Discipline, he's a Christian, Popenoe's not, but Popenoe wrote the foreword to Dare to Discipline. And he was like, everyone should read this. This is it.
Flightless Bird
Focus on The Family
He started so many different organizations. They all have extremely similar sounding names, all for the express purpose of impacting legislation.
Flightless Bird
Focus on The Family
It was this radio drama that Focus on the Family put out in the 80s. And it was basically centered around this small town called Odyssey in the middle of America. And it all surrounds this patriarch named Mr. Whitaker, who's basically a stand-in for Dr. Dobson. Except Whit is single. He's a widow. He's old. All his children are grown. He owns an ice cream shop.
Flightless Bird
Focus on The Family
And he's also a genius who works for the CIA. And he has this machine in his basement called the Imagination Station where he can send kids on a virtual reality tour of American history. That's all very revisionist, white supremacist history and Bible stories. He can actually send people to hell so kids can experience hell so that they'll become Christians. He meddles in everything.
Flightless Bird
Focus on The Family
And this program has gone on for decades. It's still going strong. It was Vice President Mike Pence's favorite program that he listened to with his children constantly. Millions of kids grew up listening to this. Crispin and I, we started our podcast where we just started listening to episodes and talking about them and
Flightless Bird
Focus on The Family
It's just all the focus on the family values, but it's just another layer of indoctrination. But the end goal is this town where everybody is a Christian and the white male patriarch, Mr. Whitaker, is basically in charge of the schools and their curriculum. All the kids listen to them. He spanks kids. You know, he's not a pastor. He's a businessman. And.
Flightless Bird
Focus on The Family
The layers of indoctrination in this show I don't think can really be expressed in this little interview, but it's just something worth mentioning, one of the ways he got to people. Chick-fil-A used to give out cassettes of Adventures in Odyssey episodes, right?
Flightless Bird
Focus on The Family
There was this book that came out called Turmoil in the Toy Box, written by some guy who had no background in anything. And he just basically went through, like, why every popular toy was, like, not okay for Christians. And... My mom read it and took all my older sister's Barbies and just donated them without even telling my sister. She was so devastated. But it's like, yeah, Barbies are immoral.
Flightless Bird
Focus on The Family
Like, we can't have Barbies anymore. And I tried to look up this guy, like... He's a nobody. And he basically just cashed in on this... There's this gullible group of people that will listen to anything you say if you say it's from God. And it worked. And that was like... Again, this is going back to Christian publishing was full of grifters. You have two choices as a kid, which really sucks.
Flightless Bird
Focus on The Family
One is... You think your parents are wrong and you're like, damn, they just took my toys. Biologically, kids are not designed to do this. I'll just say that. Dr. Dobson knew this and honestly exploited this. So what you're going to do as a kid is you're probably going to be like, my parents are right. I need to somehow be okay with this and I will figure out ways to move on.
Flightless Bird
Focus on The Family
So for me, I was like, my parents can't be wrong. God talks to them. They must be right. And that kind of drug me into this world ever deeper, which is the express aim, if I'm being perfectly honest.
Flightless Bird
Focus on The Family
This is my big thing. Dobson was a child psychologist, right? Who was obsessed with replicating like many patriarchal authoritarian political structures within the home. He eventually is basically one of the most prolific political lobbyists in American history. So he's had both careers. And I think they're intimately connected because I believe parenting is political.
Flightless Bird
Focus on The Family
I think he knew this from a very long time. I don't think there's another person in American history who has done more for... I mean, he kind of focused on anti-LGBTQ plus legislation and focused on that early on. Now that would also include anti-trans legislation.
Flightless Bird
Focus on The Family
But I don't think there's an American alive, and he's kind of hanging on death's door, but who's done more in the realm of political lobbying against queer people than James Dobson.
Flightless Bird
Focus on The Family
If you look at Project 2025 and all the organizations that are on the board of Project 2025, James Dobson has a hand in so many of those. Either he started them, was on the board, gave counsel. And I don't want to make it seem like he's like an evil genius, because if you read his books, you're like, he's not a genius.
Flightless Bird
Focus on The Family
OK, but there are these threads of intentionality that come with him understanding child development and how it can be exploited to replicate people who are in to the white supremacist authoritarianism regime that he so desperately wanted. And, you know, he's kind of getting right now.